The Advanced Machine Translation Seminar is a graduate-level seminar on current research topics in Machine Translation. The seminar will cover a variety of topics and issues related to the design, engineering, development and evaluation of modern state-of-the art MT systems. The specific topics and papers will vary from semester to semester, and students may register and receive credit for taking this course more than once. The material covered will be mostly drawn from recent conference and journal publications and will be selected based on faculty and student interest. The course will be run in a seminar format, where the students prepare presentations of selected research papers and lead in class discussion about the presented papers. Presentations will rotate among the student participants.

Prerequisites & corequisites:

• 11-731: Machine Translation, or instructor approval.

Class Meeting Time and Location:

Wednesday, 3:00PM - 4:20PM, Location: GHC 4215

 

Primary Instructor:

Alon Lavie, alavie@cs.cmu.edu, GHC 5715, 268-5655, Office Hours: By Appointment

 

Shared Space on "Google Docs":

Google Docs link to shared space. Use the "Google Docs" page to list and update the papers you would like to cover in the seminar

---

Schedule and Readings

Date	Topic	Presenter	Readings	Comments
Jan 18	Course Information	Alon Lavie
Jan 25	Minimum Imputed Risk	Michael Denkowski	Zhifei Li, Jason Eisner, Ziyuan Wang, Sanjeev Khudanpur, and Brian Roark (2011). Minimum Imputed Risk: Unsupervised Discriminative Training for Machine Translation, In Proceedings of EMNLP-11, pages 920-929, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, July 2011.	Presentation Slides
Feb 1	Name Translation and Transliteration	Waleed Ammar	Ulf Hermjakob, Kevin Knight, and Hal Daume III (2008). Name Translation in Statistical Machine Translation Learning When to Transliterate, In Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT, pages 389-397, Columbus, Ohio, USA, June 2008.	Presentation Slides
Feb 8	Binarized Forest to String Translation	Waleed Ammar	Hao Zhang, Licheng Fang, Peng Xu, and Xiaoyun Wu (2011). Binarized Forest to String Translation, In Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 835-845, Portland, Oregon, June 2011.	Presentation Slides
Feb 15	Tree-to-String MT	Justin Chiu	Ashish Vaswani, Haitao Mi, Liang Huang, and David Chiang (2011). Rule Markov Models for Fast Tree-to-String Translation, In Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 856-864, Portland, Oregon, June 2011.	Presentation Slides
Feb 22	Language Models for MT	Victor Chahuneau	Gennadi Lembersky, Noam Ordan and Shuly Wintner (2011). Language Models for Machine Translation: Original vs. Translated Texts. In Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2011), pages 363-374, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, July 2011.	Presentation Slides
Feb 29	Optimal MERT	Avneesh Saluja	Michel Galley and Chris Quirk (2011). Optimal Search for Minimum Error Rate Training. In Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2011), pages 38-49, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, July 2011.	Presentation Slides
Mar 7	Discriminative Modeling of Extraction Sets	Justin Chiu	John DeNero and Dan Klein (2010). Discriminative Modeling of Extraction Sets for Machine Translation In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1453-1463, Uppsala, Sweden, July 2010.	Presentation Slides
Mar 14	NO CLASS (Spring Break)
Mar 21	Learning Hierarchical Translation Structure	Greg Hanneman	Markos Mylonakis and Khalil Sima'an (2011). Learning Hierarchical Translation Structure with Linguistic Annotations. In Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 642-652, Portland, Oregon, June 2011.	Presentation Slides
Mar 28	Decoding by Dynamic Chunking	Austin Matthews	Sirvan Yahyaei and Christof Monz (2009). Decoding by Dynamic Chunking for Statistical Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the Twelfth MT Summit Conference, Ottawa, Canada, August 2009.	Presentation Slides
Apr 4	Domain Adaptation for SMT	Avneesh Saluja	George Foster, Cyril Goutte and Roland Kuhn (2010). Discriminative Instance Weighting for Domain Adaptation in Statistical Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 451-459, MIT, Massachusetts, USA, October 2010.	Presentation Slides
Apr 11	CRF-based Translation Models	Victor Chahuneau	Thomas Lavergne, Josep Maria Crego, Alexandre Allauzen Francois Yvon (2011). From n-gram-based to CRF-based Translation Models. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, pages 542-553, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, July 2011.	Presentation Slides
Apr 18	Efficient MERT for Hypergraphs	Jeff Flanigan	Shankar Kumar, Wolfgang Macherey, Chris Dyer and Franz Och (2009). Efficient Minimum Error Rate Training and Minimum Bayes-Risk Decoding for Translation Hypergraphs and Lattices. In Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th IJCNLP of the AFNLP, pages 163-171, Suntec, Singapore, August 2009.	Presentation Slides
Apr 24	Soft Syntactic Constraints for Hierarchical MT	Austin Matthews	Zhongqiang Huang, Martin Cmejrek, and Bowen Zhou (2010). Soft Syntactic Constraints for Hierarchical Phrase-based Translation Using Latent Syntactic Distributions. In Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 138-147, MIT, Massachusetts, USA, October 2010.	Presentation Slides
May 2	Bayesian Tree to String Grammar Induction	Jeff Flanigan	Trevor Cohn and Phil Blunsom (2009). A Bayesian Model of Syntax-Directed Tree to String Grammar Induction. In Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 352-361, Singapore, August 2009.	Presentation Slides